“In the Twentieth Century you feel like movement” (How Writing Is Written
153), writes Gertrude Stein. Compared to the nineteenth century – one that “didn’t feel that way” (153) – Stein insists that “you feel movement all the time” (153). For her, America had the first instance of what she calls, “Twentieth Century writing” (153), where “the American thing is the vitality of movement” (Writings 1932-1946 292), which appeared in the work of Walt Whitman.1 Stein’s Whitman is a surveyor of America’s “sacred industry” (Whitman, Leaves of Grass 344), one who celebrates the “thud of machinery” (343) with “the latest connections” of the “inter-transportation of the world” (347), including steam power, the great express lines, gas, petroleum, and the Pacific Railroad (347-348). Not unlike Whitman’s attention to industry, Stein suggests that the “Twentieth Century conceived an automobile as a whole, so to speak, and then created it, built it up out of its parts” (How Writing Is Written 152-153). We know that the car is central to Stein and her style.2 Indeed, she named her Fords “Aunt Pauline” and “Godiva.”3 Without gas, however, the car stays still. This chapter looks at gas and the ways that this resource informs Stein’s poetry.
In doing so, I respond to Patricia Yeager’s ruminations on the ecology and energy of literature, specifically when she asks, “what happens if we sort texts according to the energy sources that made them possible?” (“Literature” 305). How, she adds, do “we think about utility and poetry together?” (310). To address these questions, I explore forms of energy – primarily oil, but also wood, coal, and electricity – in Stein. Doing so may seem strange, because her poetry seldom comes up in ecocritical debates.4 While it is a critical commonplace to remark on Stein’s energetic experiments with language, scholars stop short of heralding her as a prophet of energy. Yet, a close consideration of excerpts from her oeuvre reveals a largely overlooked concern with the materiality of natural resources. This sentiment most directly appears in “Work Again” when she writes: “In leaning can we encounter oil” (Geography and Plays 399). Here we have the “Oil Encounter.”5 This allusion to oil provides a useful direction for reading because
Stein’s encounters with oil were oblique, whether leaning near linseed oil paintings gracing the walls of 27 rue de Fleurus or over the engine of her Ford.
The energy humanities is a growing field.6 There is, however, a gap when it comes to research on the modernist avant-garde. This is especially strange because, as Imre Szeman notes, modernism is either “a small subset of a long period of oil literature” or “anticipates and participates in the birth of the hegemony of oil” (“Literature and Energy Futures” 324). Szeman’s explanation is that, like every contemporary social narrative, literature participates in rather than challenges the fiction of surplus energy (324). Yet, as I show, Stein does not necessarily have a “faith in surplus” (325); rather, she is acutely aware of the nature of energy and, in turn, this affects her own cultural production. While Stein might be one of Szeman’s “exceptions,” like Upton Sinclair’s
Oil! (1927), we can and should scrutinize modernism’s avant-garde aesthetics if we are to address and perhaps rectify our “epistemic inability or unwillingness to name our energy ontologies” (324). Starting with Stein, I am interested in reading the “difficult”
modernists with energy in mind. After all, their forms are fueled by something, and their experimental poetics might offer us some answers.
Energy and natural resources preoccupied Stein as early as “Normal Motor Automatism” (1896).7 “As I say a motor goes inside and the car goes on,” writes Stein, “but my business my ultimate business as an artist was not with where the car goes as it goes but with the movement inside that is the essence of its going” (Writings 1932-1946
305). Here, “essence” is the French word for “gasoline.”8 Aware of energy, Stein needed it, too. Nearly a thousand pages, The Making of Americans – started in 1903, finished in 1911, and published in 1925 – is but one example of Stein’s prolific nature.
Yet, the materiality of Stein’s energy is overlooked. Instead, she is often seen as a conceptual artist experimenting with language or a self-conscious scribe engaging
irresistible dictation.9 When considered in this way, the view of Stein’s approach to “language as a living, moving, acting entity” (Meyer 147) loses sight of the natural resources and labour that go into her cultural production. “I am occupied by coal” (As Fine As Melanctha 63), Stein writes, and, elsewhere, she refers to the act of “cranking my machine” (Bee Time Vine 194).
This chapter, then, recovers the energy of Stein’s Whitmanian side. Indeed, we see her channeling his celebratory side, too, in a poem about Aunt Pauline when she exclaims, “Hurrah for America” (Geography and Plays 392). And so we see this Stein, for instance, in “Yet Dish” from 1913, which is a playful poem – “Yet Dish” is “Yiddish” – composed of sixty-nine numbered stanzas with anywhere from one to seven lines; the fifty-second stanza reads: “Leaves of gas, leaves of get a towel louder” (Writings 1903- 1932 370). From Leaves of Grass to “Leaves of gas,” Stein shows off her Whitman, the one who admires “the great derrick” (Leaves of Grass 360) in “A Song for Occupations.” Moreover, she gestures to how the uncanny nature of oil as millennia old organic matter (“Leaves”) constitutes the biochemical make-up of petroleum. Stein’s playfulness is part of a petropoetics, a relationship between art and oil that I unpack in this chapter through a close reading of her works. This petropoetics is evident, for example, elsewhere in “Yet Dish”:
Nice oil pail. No gold go at. Nice oil pail.
Near a paper lag sought.
What is an astonishing won door. A please spoon. (Writings 1903-1932 367) In this subterranean Stein, it is an astonishing wonder (“won door”) what can be found underground as “Nice oil” slips into sounding like “soil.” Indeed, there are other dirty, dripping sounds resonating throughout Stein’s work, as in “Guillaume Apollinaire” from 1913, which reads:
Give known or pin ware. Fancy teethe, gas strips.
Elbow elect, sour stout pore, pore caesar, pour state at. Leave eye lessons I. Leave I. Lessons. I. Leave I lessons, I. (A SteinReader 279)
As the strange “gas strips” sounds like “gas drips,”10 we might take a lesson from Stein and keep our eyes and ears open for the sights and sounds of her energy consciousness.
By attending to this energy consciousness, I tell a largely unknown story of Stein, one which foregrounds the energy that fuels her work and world. This overlooked
fascination with oil and other resources in Stein’s writing points to an incipient energy consciousness that does not flourish until much later. Analyzing samples of Stein’s oeuvre, I explore her latent yet manifest energetic materiality. This enables us to account for how Stein’s famously complicated style engages a system of material relations in modernism that is not necessarily ecologically or environmentally oriented per se, but still foregrounds the ways in which nature and culture are entangled. Her work helps us to think about the stuff that goes into poetry, the objectness of poetics, and the energy of poetic expression. Accordingly, I explore the characteristics of her energy consciousness through representations of wood, coal, and electricity, which, ultimately, exhibits the transformative, powerful, and erotic nature of energy. Moreover, I focus on features of Stein’s petropoetics, an idea I explain later, with special attention to representation, form, temporality, agency, and biotechnology. To close, I turn to the notion of the embodiment of energy in and through the figure of Stein’s car. Like dumpster diving, my attention to petropoetics here sustains an interest in how a text engages with the material world; however, unlike dumpster diving, petropoetics focuses more on the oblique ways in which the sensuousness of a substance affects the work based on varying realities and forms of surplus and scarcity. Garbage does not generate energy, but oil does, and so the latter permeates the world in a different way. Yet, energy can be and is wasted, too.11 Similar but different, waste and oil, dumpster diving and petropoetics, both register a tension around the entangled relationship between nature and culture in dirty modernism.
In 1874, Stein was born into oil. A native of Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now Pittsburgh), she spent her early years in the home of the first oil well in America, or what is known as “The Oil State.”12 Black gold made its mark on her. Indeed, Stein famously collected oil. Once in Paris, she encountered it daily while living at 27 rue de Fleurus, which on Saturday nights doubled as an upstart artists’ salon (Mellow 6). Shocking the senses, avant-garde art covered the walls, but, more importantly, the salon’s spotlight on oil painting discloses the link between petroleum and culture. According to one
biographer, the sheer quantity of paintings was overwhelming: Gertrude and her brother Leo collected “so industriously that the three available walls of the studio […] were crammed with pictures hung row above row” (6-7). Indeed, the oils spilled into nearby rooms (7). Although this metaphor – an oil spill of art – is slippery, I invoke it to draw
attention to the resources of these artworks. Whether or not Stein singled out the
relationship between oil painting and oil as a resource is less important than the fact that this scene illustrates the importance of teasing out the tension between art and the production of it, especially when it comes to the energetic materiality of oil in Stein’s writing.
Where does Stein find the energy to write the way she does? At times, her stamina is surprising. In “An Instant Answer or A Hundred Prominent Men,” she writes the word “one” a hundred times (Writings 1903-1932 484). Also, the level of concentration required by Stein to play with the semiotics of one word is extraordinary. Ironically, the following excerpt from “Play” reveals just how much work Stein puts into what Ulla E. Dydo describes as “an exercise in disciplined writing with a reductive vocabulary” (A Stein Reader 147):
Play, play every day, play and play and play away, and then play the play you played to-day, the play you play every day, play it and play it. Play it and
remember it and ask to play it. Play it, and play it and play away. Certainly every one wants you to play, every one wants you to play away, to play every day, to play and play, to play the play you play every day, to play and remember it and ask to play it and play it and to play away and to play every day and to-day and all day. (147)
“Free time is shackled to its contrary” (187), writes Theodor W. Adorno; indeed, he continues, “free time is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labor” (194). Stein’s freewheeling play is work, which requires energy. The effort of Stein’s labour lives in each and every sentence, like this one from “Patriarchal Poetry”: “To be we to be to be we to be to be to be we to be we to be to be to be to be to be to be to be we we to be to be to be we to be” (Writings 1903-1932 575). Surely, this is an iteration of the Steinian sentence – a ubiquitous type – but it also gestures to Stein’s awareness of the work of reading her writing. The repetition of the infinitive with the inclusive pronoun
foregrounds a shared existence and exertion of energy between reader and writer. Stein is conscious of energy operating in her writing and world as she forgoes mimesis or realism and opts for materializing the stuff of work.
Self-reflexive about consumption, Stein’s energy consciousness is fueled by economic forces like scarcity. In a letter postmarked 23 February 1917 to Carl Van Vechten, she reports that she is “running a little Ford into the country for the American relief committee and […] enjoying it,” while also noting that, “Paris is nice, looking for coal is xciting and now we have it” (1: 58). Twenty-four years later, Stein is still
cognizant of resources; in a letter to Thornton Wilder, she writes: “I am having my car changed to burn alchohol [sic] instead of essence [gasoline], we can make alcohol, and the days and weeks go by so quickly” (285). Her artworks reveal this, too. In “Painted Lace” she writes: “The search for food and fuel became secretly cooking potatoes” (Painted Lace 2). The frustration of trying to find resources yields the shame of
consuming the poor person’s potato. An awareness of the economy of energy is evident, especially in “A Sonatina Followed by Another”: “We do not use coal, we burn wood, we find it more economical and pleasanter. Before the war we use to wish that we could afford to burn wood instead of coal, now that we are no richer and wood is dearer we find it more economical to burn wood” (Bee Time Vine 5). Often, the rarity of a resource is reflected by a marginal reference in a poetic list:
Offal slow. Slowly. With fern. Deal term. Reckless manner. Naughty spoon. Murder. ……… Spit.
Tender toe binder. Paper coal gas. (119)
Seemingly inconsequential, there is energy around natural resources in the unpunctuated line, “Paper coal gas.” Writing about commas in “Poetry and Grammar,” Stein says, “for a long time I felt very definitely about them and would have nothing to do with them” (Writings 1932-1946 320). For her, “commas are servile and they have no life of their
own” (320); a comma, moreover, “keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it” (320). Ultimately, “a comma is a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath” (321). Without commas, then, the line, “Paper coal gas” produces a short burst of energy. The syntax of this line also shows us how paper is Stein’s natural resource, which is equal to coal and gas; moreover, it gestures to an inverted order of events. Paper does not grow on trees; rather, it comes from them. Through multiple steps and
mediations, the energy derived from coal and gas yields a product to write on. Reading forward – from left to right – we are going backward: we trace the truncated path of paper back to the earth all within the span of three words. In this poem, energy
materializes around object relations. Surely, Stein is a writer who is conscious of how she consumes the energy of the environs, which is perhaps best articulated with the opening of “Americans”: “Eating and paper” (Writings 1903-1932 373). “To step outside of petromodernity would require a step outside of media, including the contemporary book” (“The Aesthetics of Petroleum, after Oil!” 64), writes Stephanie Le Menager. At some level, Stein is aware of “the inescapability of petroleum infrastructure” (64)—that is, how “[e]lectricty, fuel oil, and natural gas have kept press equipment running” (64).
“There are very many who are very serious ones in going to be doing something in the way of artistic creation. There are very many who are working many hours every day with serious intention” (The Making of Americans 693), writes Stein, who is one of these “very serious ones.” Thinking about “working many hours every day,” I want to focus on the transformative, powerful, and erotic nature of energy in Stein through wood, coal, and electricity, respectively. Turning to these areas of analysis helps us to explore the characteristics of Stein’s energy consciousness.
“It is snowing all day, and I have cut wood all day” (qtd. in Mellow 443), writes Stein in a letter to William Rogers, or the Kiddie, as she chops away at the block
elsewhere, too: “Cut wood cut wood” (A Stein Reader 328). From kindling to a basket of wood to the fireplace,13 Stein spent time with nature’s bounty. With her woodwork in mind, we can consider how there is a transformative energy in her wordplay. That is, a form of energy can be found when similar sounds produce possibility within the realm of meaning. Wavering between one signified and another, the work of the pun generates a
brief, yet frenetic act of signification. While the push and pull of puns are everywhere in Stein, producing a range of affects, it is the “would” of “wood” that is at the core of her energetic wit. “Wood has not that meaning” (Geography and Plays 108), she writes. Like wood’s ability to be otherwise, Stein’s philosophy of the “would” for words is one of possibility, condition, and intention. Experimenting with encoding, Stein opens up decoding to more movement and activity. At every turn, she seems to ask, “What would this mean if I did that?” For this reason, Stein loves wood for its energy-to-be really or linguistically other:
In This Shape Wood Indeed I do love wood. And coal.
And speak of horses. We do not mind coughs.
You mean of a machine. (Bee Time Vine 208-209)
In this early poem dated around the arrival of Stein’s Ford (c. 1917), one that
anthropomorphizes the car’s horsepower, the title tells all with its reference to the shape of wood, or what “would” be. Here we find Stein’s transformative energy in terms of both pun and potentiality. As Stein writes elsewhere, there is an “Object that is in wood” (Writings 1903-1932 322) – one that is inward (“in wood”) – to be pulled out of the plane of possibility. Iterations of Stein’s wordplay, then, point to a polysemic transformative energy.
Stein’s energy consciousness also registers the power of coal, which is, perhaps, felt in its heft—“coal is tonny” (Geography and Plays 87). As a biochemical entity, coal works wonders. In “Turkey and Bones and Eating and We Like It,” a character named “Anthony and coal” says, “I believe that coal is better than wood. If coal is good it burns longer. In any case it is very difficult to get here” (Writings 1903-1932 397). For Stein, the resource’s radiant luminosity reveals its energy: “Colour is in coal. Coal is outlasting roasting and a spoonful, a whole spoon that is full is not spilling. Coal any coal is copper” (330). The hue and heat of this fuel receives preferential treatment as a commodity on the marketplace in Stein’s “Advertisements”: “I do not want the gas stove. It has a round
oven. It does not bake. We use coal by preference” (Geography and Plays 344). Stranger than Stein’s direct endorsement of how “Evian water is very good” (346), coal is still a “natural thing” (344). There is, however, a dirty side to this lauded lump of combustible carbon. On more than one occasion,14 we find coal paired with coffee in Stein—for